The Cleansed Heart
Bhagavan Sri Sathya Sai Baba, in the following discourse, urges us to surrender completely to the Lord and make our every action a yajna [sacrifice] rather than a battle.
Gain, gain, that seems to be the refrain in every activity of man. When a heap of grain is measured, the counting begins not with one but with the utterance of the word, labha (gain) instead! The wise hold that there is another gain that is far more desirable—attaining the presence of God, merging in the supreme bliss that God is, liberating oneself for the pursuit of the highest pleasure, divine bliss.
Become akin to God, His kith and kin. Do not aspire to be a wage earner in God’s household. Do not demand wages that are bargained for or calculated. The work done for wages will not be as sincere and as joyful as that done through love and reverence. Brothers and sons do not demand wages at so much per day, as their right. They are well looked after by the master of the household; everything is found for them, whether they demand it or not.
Ananyaaaschinthayantho maam,
Ye Janaah paryupaasathe
Theshaam nithyaabhiyukthaanam
Yogakshemam vahaamyaham
This assurance is given by the Lord in the Gita [song of God]. Whoever has no thought other than of Me, whoever always dwells in reverence to Me, with such I always reside and for such I provide the wherewithal here and hereafter. Reading this assurance, many ask the question: “Well, we are doing this puja [worship] and that; let us see what He does for us in return.” But they pay no attention to the conditions laid down for the conferment of grace.
In Telugu, there is a poem that advises people to give up kinsmen who do not come to your rescue, horses that throw you off the saddle, and Gods that do not confer boons when worshipped. But this act of discarding is allowed in the poem to sumatis [intelligent] only, that is to people with good discrimination. Of course, such people know the ways of worship as mentioned in the Gita verse quoted above and so, the boons they deserve will be granted to them unasked. The grace of God is immeasurable; He is love, all of Him. Contemplate on Him as love, recite His name as the embodiment of love, and revere Him as love.
This is the easiest path to God. Some feel despair that God is very distant, as they have no resources with which to visit holy places and prostrate before famous shrines sanctified by saints and sages, or no time or talent to master the Vedas [scriptures]. This is quite wrong, for God does not measure out grace in proportion to these external achievements. He is not moved by quantity. To appease your hunger, the grain in all the granaries of the world is not needed; a handful is enough. To slake your thirst, you do not crave for all the waters of all the rivers; just a full glass suffices. Similarly, one little act of surrender is enough to win His grace forever. Years of asceticism or study or sadhana [spiritual practice] are not called for. “You and nothing else”—fix this in the mind and live in that conviction. That will transmute all your acts into worship—invaluable puja.
Arjuna was sentenced by the Lord to engage himself in warfare against his elders and kinsman. His heroic lineage and kshatriya (warrior) blood urged him forward to fight; his fear of sin and retribution urged him to desist. “Am I to rule over the kingdom after winning it by destroying those whom I revere and hold dear?” he asked himself. Then the Lord instructed him, right in between the opposing armies. In the second chapter of the Gita, He told him of sharanagati, the doctrine of surrender. Arjuna heard it and said, “Lord, I have no will of my own; I surrender to you.” Thereafter, the battle was transmuted into a yajna (offering to God) where adharma [unrighteousness] was offered in the sacrificial fire.
When an act is done in a spirit of surrender to the Lord, it becomes a yajna; when it is done in the spirit of egoism, it ends in a battle. Daksha, the emperor, performed a yajna, but in his pride he neglected the Lord and His shakti [power]. So, the yajna was upset by a fight. When there was no egoism tainting the battle, it became sublimated into a yajna. That is the alchemy that sharanagati (surrender) can accomplish.
First the self-assurance that you are “daasoham” (I am His instrument); then, through the winning of His grace, the consciousness that you are “Shivoham” (I am Shiva) or “soham” (I am That) will become your unshakable experience. To grasp this grand truth of the immanence of Godhead, the first path is bhakti [devotion]. Gradually, as bhakti is intensified, one sees the form of God that is revered, in all.
It is difficult to understand the advaitic [non-dualistic] conception that “my reality and the reality of the Universal are the same.” “I am That” can be realized only through the sharp intellect and clear discrimination. This cannot be established in consciousness by external argument or efforts. One has to be adept in dhyana [meditation] and vichara [enquiry].
Once a monk diagnosed the illness of a rich lord as a defect in the eye. The man was advised to cast his eyes only on a single color. The lord collected all the paint he could get, all the painters of the region and daubed everything green—walls, roofs, fences, roads, tree stumps, etc. When the monk returned after some months, he was surprised at the strange appearance of the town. He asked the lord the reason for this and was told that it was in accordance with the monk’s own prescription! The monk chided the lord for taking all that trouble and spending all that money as he could have gained the same end by putting on a pair of green glasses! When the vision is clarified into brahmatattwam [brahma principal], then, all will be seen as the one basic brahmam [supreme self]. No amount of external asceticism or attire can instill that conviction.
The basic brahmic unity makes everyone equal; this equality can be realized only at that high level of experience. Until then, all talk of treating everyone as equal to one another is more self-deceit. Even such a simple thing as the advice to speak the truth leads to complications, which can be resolved only by compromise. The Gita advises you to speak: words that will not provoke or enrage, words that are true, and words that are pleasant and beneficial.
There is a story about the Pandavas [5 brothers in the epic Mahabharata] and the short-tempered sage, Durvasa. When Ashwatthama returned from pilgrimage at the conclusion of the battle of Kurukshetra and learnt that the Pandavas had won, He swore that He would exterminate the victors single-handedly and set out to find them.
Sri Krishna desired to save them from the mighty man’s mortal ire. He approached Durvasa and requested him to keep the brothers in his custody in some hiding place. Durvasa agreed, but on one condition—if Ashwatthama asked him where they were, he [Durvasa] would not utter a lie! Krishna agreed but told Durvasa that he could speak the truth, but speak it in an angry tone, that would be enough. So the five brothers hid themselves in a cave over which the sage (who had destroyed many by the terrible imprecations with which he reacted whenever he was provoked into anger) sat in silent meditation.
Ashwatthama saw Durvasa, and with nervous steps and palpitating heart he ventured to disturb his meditation. He asked with fear, whether the Pandavas were anywhere near him. Durvasa was silent for some time. Then in a burst of thunder and lightening, he shouted, “Where do you think they are? They are here!” His tone was full of disgust and resentment at being interrupted and his face indicated that an imprecation was on the tip of his tongue. Ashwatthama did not dare stand there any longer. He interpreted the statement, “They are here” to mean only, “Well, what are you looking for here? If they are here, what dare you do about it?” and left. By watching mere external appearances, you cannot judge the reality.
Sudama, too, was in the same predicament. When his wife directed him to proceed to Dwaraka and pray to his boyhood friend Sri Krishna for material help, he was nervous about the success of his mission as he fixed his attention on the externals, namely the fort, palace, bodyguards, and all the paraphernalia of kings. He compared them with his own dress, appearance, and the small value of the offering that he was taking to Him. But the Lord cares for the purity of the motive behind the act, not for the pomp and the show with which it is done.
Real bhakti is also a matter of the inner consciousness, not of the outer behavior. There are people who complain that their devotion to the Lord is limited and shaped by the worldly bonds that bind them. It is not the world that binds them; it is they who bind themselves to the world!
People trap monkeys by placing big pots with small mouths in the gardens and putting some groundnuts inside them. They then wait nearby. The monkeys come and put their hands inside the pots and fill their fists with the nuts. Now, they find that the hands full of nuts cannot be taken out of the pot, for the mouth of the pot is too small for the fists. In this helpless condition, they can be caught easily. They fall prey to the trappers. If only they drop the nuts, they could escape from the burden of the pot and get free. But the attachment to the nuts spells disaster to them.
So, too, man gets attached to sense-objects that he is loath to give up and thereby gets entangled in the world, forgetting the purpose for which he has come. This is supreme ignorance. You must try to make the best use of the time allotted to you.
You do not try to find out what you were before birth, after birth, and after death. The potter digs up clay to make his pots. That creates a pit somewhere, but in front of his house the clay has become a heap. And after the process on the wheel, the clay becomes a pot, which becomes clay again when it breaks and disintegrates. Clay persists in the pit, the heap, and the pots. The pots are short-lived, and so they represent the jivas, the individuals. Clay is the brahmic substance, which underlies all creation. Know this and get established in the absolute.
Source: Sanathana Sarathi, Feb. 1967
